Backyard Baseball, Boys in Dress Clothes, USA, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Backyard Baseball, Boys in Dress Clothes, USA, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Backyard Baseball, Boys in Dress Clothes, USA, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-849B60

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Two boys in the side yard of a clapboard house have organized a baseball game with the solemn intensity that 1950s boyhood applied to all outdoor pursuits, regardless of available players or equipment. The older boy has wound up at a patch of bare dirt that decades of the same game have worn into an unofficial home plate, wooden bat cocked with genuine menace, wearing the kind of collared shirt and leather dress shoes that American mothers in this era sent children outside in on the theory that clothes improved character. Behind him a smaller child — a younger brother by the look of it — has taken up the catcher position, crouching in the same good clothes, squinting with the focused uncertainty of someone who has not yet worked out which direction the ball will come from. The entire arrangement assumes a pitcher, an outfield, and a second base, none of which exist. In the 1950s this gap between the game as imagined and the game as available was simply called playing.

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